When fossil fuel companies control politics and the media, protest is more important than ever

It’s Woodside’s world — we’re just renting it from them while they boil it.

Woodside has its own media organs — not merely the world’s most powerful media company, News Corp, but high-volume right-wing plagiarism site the Daily Mail and Kerry Stokes’ Seven (which, unlike News Corp and the Daily Mail, at least isn’t a foreign-owned troll farm interfering in Australian politics). It has its own federal and state politicians on both sides as its policymaking arm. As we know, it has its own intelligence agency in ASIS. It has the WA police force as its private militia. It has all the apparatus of an autocratic state except the military parades.

Woodside’s propaganda arms are continuing their war against independent media and objective coverage of Woodside: in a story that the term “beat-up” is far too generous for, Stokes’ West Australian reported that Four Corners will be broadcasting “controversial” footage of a protest outside the home of Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill, “despite intense backlash and an internal review revealing the public broadcaster lied”. Not to be outdone, The Australian hastily cobbled together some confected outrage this morning.

This is pure circularity: the “intense backlash” was manufactured by Woodside’s political and media allies themselves.

Meanwhile, Woodside’s security militia, the WA police, demanded the ABC hand over all footage related to climate protests, leading to concerns the footage might reveal the identities of ABC sources.

There’s a reason why there’s a new round of frothing by Woodside’s police and media minions: Four Corners is examining one of the key weapons increasingly being used by the fossil fuel-political-police-media alliance — the application of severe penalties to climate protesters and police harassment of them. The phenomenon is by no means confined to the Woodside state. The mere idea of a media outlet uncovering the process of applying massive state force against protesters, those trying to halt activity that is inflicting colossal damage on the planet, alarms the fossil fuel alliance.

This abuse of state power is an inevitable outcome of the process by which fossil fuel companies have captured the state and the media in Australia. Fossil fuel companies effectively control both sides of politics, at least to the extent that Labor will continue to allow the proliferation of fossil fuel projects and minimal taxation of the profits from them, via political donations, offers of post-political jobs, threats of heavily funded media campaigns and, in Labor’s case, the co-option of relevant unions to apply internal pressure within Labor to support fossil fuels. At the state level, this means effective control of both the policymaking process and the criminal justice apparatus, including the police.

This effectively closes off the political system as an avenue of climate action, even as the planet grows hotter at a seemingly ever-quicker pace and extreme weather becomes the norm. Those who recognise the need for far more urgent action to halt the rise in CO2 emissions are blocked from achieving anything through Parliament, while the terms of public debate are framed by large media companies: climate protesters are “extremists”, fossil fuel CEOs innocuous business figures generating billions in exports and thousands of jobs while having their privacy and families threatened by radicals.

Denied the possibility of a political solution, advocates of more urgent action naturally turn to protest and direct action, only for that avenue to be demonised by media companies and targeted by fossil fuel-controlled governments.

But using the state’s monopoly on violence to deter this choice won’t wish away its causes. Woodside and its political agents can’t ban the laws of physics. As the planet gets hotter and more lives and livelihoods are destroyed and disrupted, and the political system remains blocked to genuine action, the urge for protest and direct action will only increase, no matter what the penalties — especially for younger Australians, who stand to suffer far more from our obsession with fossil fuels than the middle-aged people who dominate the media and parliament.

Real journalists want to report on, and analyse, this literally disastrous misapplication of power in the interests of fossil fuel companies. The rest may as well be on Woodside’s payroll.